A wiki is a website that is collaboratively maintained by a particular group of people.  The wiki users contribute to the wiki by adding, editing, and linking pages on the site.  Wiki is also the Hawaiian word meaning "fast" or "quick."  To me, a wiki is a website were people can quickly edit the wiki to accomplish a common goal.  For Ella Dolhonde Elementary School, those goals are varied.  The wiki is our public website for students, parents, and faculty.  The wiki also contains the school's calendar; it links to the eBoard; and it lets the teachers add content as a school community.

A Wiki as a Dynamic Website

The dynamic nature of a wiki is one of its primary features, and it is the feature that makes a wiki a simple and quick tool.  The only thing that you need for a wiki to work is a web browser.  Nearly every computer, including PDAs, tablet computers, Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and ten year old computers, run modern web browsers that allow anyone to view and edit a wiki.  Modern wikis also promote accessibility by using graphical editors, which provide formatting capabilities that are similar to desktop word processing applications.  The combination of easy access and editing has allowed wikis to serve a wide variety of needs by many different groups of people.

A Wiki as a Collaboration Tool

The collaborative nature of a wiki is the feature that get a lot of attention.  It is easy to see why.  With no or poor collaboration tools, a group actually has to perform additional work to collaborate.  For instance, a group of students are assigned a project, but all the students have different daily schedules.  The students can meet as a group; but I can tell you from experience that it will be difficult to get the entire group together.  With a collaborative tool like a wiki, a lot of the group's work can stay online.  Everyone can see changes as they occur and assist each other.  For a more in depth analysis of using a wiki for collaboration, see the video below titled Wikis in Plain English.

What Other Educators Say About Wikis^[1]

In the following TeacherTube video, several educators (and PBwiki users) describe what a wiki is to them.  They also talk about how they use a PBwiki.

Using a Wiki for Collaboration^[2]

This video describes in plain English how a wiki can be used for collaboration.  It also presents how a wiki is better for a collaborative project than email.